SOURCE: Daleski, H. M. “Far from the Madding Crowd: The Only Love.” In Thomas Hardy and Paradoxes of Love, pp. 56-82. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Daleski analyzes the forms of love in Far from the Madding Crowd, placing it in the context of later novels.

I

Far from the Madding Crowd, says Howard Babb, is “not in the same class with Hardy's later achievements”; and Irving Howe echoes him in stating it is a novel that “by no stretch of affection could be called major.”¹ It seems to me, however, that if Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure clearly stand alone as Hardy's two great novels, Far from the Madding Crowd is nonetheless a major achievement and as good as anything else he wrote. Admittedly, it has one poorly contrived and ineffective sequence—the Greenhill Fair episode, which brings Troy...